Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
Ten years ago, Marc Vetri wrote the acclaimed Mastering Pasta — equal parts dough science and cookbook. Now consider the last decade for Vetri: He opened high-end restaurants in Las Vegas and Kyoto, Japan, as well as Pizzeria Salvy at the Comcast Technology Center. In early 2020, just three weeks before the pandemic shut down Philadelphia restaurants, he debuted Fiorella. The casual 14-seat pasta bar in the former Fiorella’s butcher shop on the outskirts of the Italian Market unleashed a new round of creativity for Vetri and his chefs. “We had tons of new noodles and we’ve also had a lot more for the other restaurants [like Vetri Cucina, the Center City flagship] over that time,” Vetri said last week. “I figured, ‘Why don’t I write a Fiorella book and tell the story?’ When I started to talk to the publisher, they were lukewarm on the thought of a Fiorella-specific book. They were like, ‘That’s very local. No one’s going to really know about it. Why don’t you just write another pasta book?’” And so he has, with the clever title The Pasta Book, published this week. David Joachim is Vetri’s co-author, as he has been for his other five books. If you consider Mastering Pasta as a graduate-level seminar — with its earnest dissection of wheat and gluten alongside recipes and technique — you might think of The Pasta Book as a solid undergrad course that actually sends you into the kitchen. “This is more about the whole creative process — matching the noodles with the sauce, how we think about new dishes and come up with things that work, flavors that work, sauces that work,” Vetri said. The Pasta Book delivers Vetri’s pasta logic in an approachable, recipe-forward package, with a bonus: QR codes linking to videos. How to make a proper cacio e pepe? Vetri lays out the basics, even detailing how to crush the peppercorns, and then goes one step further by sending you to a two-minute video lesson. It’s basically “Mastering Pasta: The Home-Cook Cut.” The tone is classic Vetri: opinionated and technical, but encouraging. The Pasta Book is designed as an everyday cooking manual, with 80 or so recipes and lots of photos to supplement the QR codes. It’s organized less like a chef’s notebook and more like a weeknight-to-weekend guide — organized from basic to more complex — with recipe chapters grouped by the sauce, not by shape. When I asked Vetri for his favorite recipe from the book, he demurred. “If you’re asking me for the one that I eat most often? I’ll eat whatever is on the menu, but even if we have these awesome other things, I’m just going to grab the rigatoni and sausage. That’s my fallback.” The recipe calls for hot Italian fennel sausage — the old-time butcher shop’s specialty. For a beginner, he recommends the spaghetti pomodoro — but do it right. “It’s really all about the texture of the noodle and the flavor of the sauce and then how you emulsify it,” he said. “I have a saying, ‘Hug the noodle.’ I hate when I see noodles with just a ladle of sauce right on it. For me, that’s the worst thing in the world. You have to toss the noodles with the sauce. You do it like 30 times, so that the fat from the oil and the starch that’s in the water emulsifies with the San Marzanos,” Vetri explains. “It’s just kind of something really nice.”
